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Learn how Zero Trust security can help minimize damage from a breach, support hybrid work, protect sensitive data, and more.

The post 5 reasons to adopt a Zero Trust security strategy for your business appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

As previewed by Alice Bee, The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition doesn’t simply bundle up Obsidian’s spacefaring RPG with its DLC expansions. It’s also an unexpected remaster, redoing and fine-tuning everything from companion AI and facial animations to weather effects and dynamic lighting. It’s an enticing prospect for a game that never previously counted visuals as its strong suit, though there will be a catch: the Spacer’s Choice Edition will have significantly higher PC system requirements than the 2019 original.

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Just the mention of it - Fallout New Vegas Remastered - is enough to make my skin tingle. With the future of Bethesda’s RPG game series currently uncertain, and only a few hints at a possible Fallout 5 release date, the prospect of the greatest apocalyptic survival sim ever made being refreshed and re-released for modern PCs is, frankly, the stuff of dreams. But maybe, just maybe, it could happen, as two developers from Obsidian, the Pentiment and Outer Worlds studio behind the 2010 original, say a Fallout New Vegas remaster would be “awesome.”

MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Fallout: New Vegas mods, Fallout 5 release date, The best RPG games on PC 2022

This post contains spoilers for HBO's "The Last of Us" and the video game series of the same name.

In true "The Last of Us" tradition, the latest episode of the HBO series delivers yet another emotional gut-punch by centering the story around Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and her best friend/crush Riley (Storm Reid). The previous episode ended on a cliffhanger, where Joel (Pedro Pascal) seemed to be on the verge of death after getting stabbed and losing a ton of blood. "I can't do this without you, Joel," Ellie pleads desperately, as she is stranded in the middle of nowhere and does not have the resources or know-how to save Joel's life. Pushed into an extreme situation like never before, Ellie relives the incident that marked the beginning of the end: An unforgettable night at the mall with her best friend, Riley, whom she loved, and lost too soon.

There is plenty to talk about in terms of this particular flashback, which is based on the 2014 "The Last of Us: Left Behind" DLC, a supplementary chapter that focused on Ellie and her dynamic with Riley, who is mentioned in passing in the games. "Left Behind" not only provides greater context to Ellie's past and her emotional landscape but also centers a queer teen romance rather beautifully, which was a rarity in the mainstream video game arena at the same. Series creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin seamlessly alternate between Ellie's past and present to explore her in greater depth, which provides the perfect opportunity to dive into the night that changed everything for Ellie, and how some things will always be defined by her memories of Riley.

One such thing is Ellie's love for Mortal Kombat II, and the specific game-related moment she shared with Riley one last time.

A Half-Truth

In episode 3, which is predominantly Bill and Frank's episode, Joel and Ellie arrive at an abandoned garage, where the latter leaps with excitement on spotting a defunct "Mortal Kombat II" arcade machine. While talking about Mileena's cool-as-heck fatality in the game (where she eats her opponent and barfs out their bones), Ellie mentions that she "had a friend who knew everything about it." As Ellie has spent most of her life in a FEDRA-sanctioned school and does not even know how a seatbelt works, this moment gives off the impression that the friend she mentions must've told Ellie about the game. Although this moment initially plays off as an in-game Easter egg, Ellie's words only reveal half of the truth in hindsight.

When we flashback to Ellie's room while she was in school, it is littered with real media references of the time, as well as in-universe media, such as the "Savage Starlight" comic series (which is a collectible in "Part I"). There, we also see a "Mortal Kombat" poster, which is most probably something Ellie found while scavenging for stuff she is interested in, as physical collectibles or remnants of media would be pretty difficult to come across in the fungus-infected world of "The Last of Us." Following that logic, it would be borderline impossible for Ellie to have come across a "Mortal Kombat II" arcade machine, let alone have the chance to play the game. However, she does end up doing so, thanks to Riley, who takes her to an abandoned mall and the two play the game several times together.

Naturally, this memory is not only an integral part of her relationship with Riley, but this moment of pure bliss is tainted with the knowledge of what came next, and the horrors that followed.

Riley Is The Key To Understanding Ellie's Core Motivations

"The Last of Us" is steadily edging towards painting a more comprehensive picture of who Ellie and Joel are as people, and the games make it fairly clear that the two are motivated by a complex set of reasons. In Ellie's case, survivor's guilt is a crucial motivator for her to keep moving forward and provide a cure, and the catalyst for the same is the cruel nature of Riley's death. In the show, Riley reveals that she has been posted elsewhere now that she is a part of the Fireflies, and that she has to leave Ellie behind and this is goodbye. Although Riley does not initially articulate her feelings for Ellie in words, the mall adventure is clearly meant to be a date, where she surprises Ellie with everything she loves — from a lit-up carousel that the two ride whilst drunk to a neon-drenched arcade that houses "Mortal Kombat II," which they play together.

Riley is also a reminder of a time when Ellie did not know better, as she was too naive to understand how unbelievably corrupt and cruel FEDRA can be. After she is taken in by Marlene and her ongoing journey with Joel, Ellie understands that the world is not quite as black and white as she had believed it to be, and that even those who fight against injustice are capable of cruelty. Riley's death hits harder considering that the two had decided to face the inevitable together, with Ellie having no knowledge that she would survive the ordeal. The utter confusion, relief, grief, and denial of surviving such a harrowing night while losing the girl you love must have been horrible for Ellie. To be forced to live with that weight is unbearable.

Read this next: The 30 Best Zombie Movies Of All Time

The post The Last of Us Shows the Sad Reason Ellie Lied About Her Mortal Kombat Knowledge appeared first on /Film.

This week is the long-awaited launch of AMD's second generation of V-Cache equipped consumer chips, the Ryzen 7000X3D family. Aimed primarily at gamers, tomorrow morning AMD will be releasing a pair of their latest-generation Ryzen 7000 chips with the extra cache stacked on, including the Ryzen 9 7950X3D (16C/32T) and the Ryzen 7 7900X3D (12C/24T). Both chips build upon their Ryzen 7000X-series predecessors by adding a further 64MB of L3 cache, bringing them to an impressive total of 128 MB of L3 cache.

Meanwhile, a third SKU, the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, is in the works for April 6th. That part will offer 8 CPU cores and 96 MB of L3 cache, making it the most direct successor to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

Ultimately, all three chips will serve to update AMD's product stack by combining the strengths of the Zen 4 CPU architecture with the performance benefits of the extra L3 cache, which during the overlapping period of the last several months, has been split between the Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen 7000 families. In short, PC gamers will finally be able to have their cake and eat it too, gaining access to AMD's Zen 4 microarchitecture and its myriad of benefits (higher IPC, higher clockspeeds, DDR5, PCIe 5) with a nice helping of additional L3 cache slathered on top.

From that stack, today we're reviewing the new flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D. The 7950X3D offers 16 Zen 4 cores spread over two CCDs (8C/16T per CCD). AMD had to elect one of the CCDs to stack the additional L3 cache onto, resulting in a new-to-AMD heterogeneous CPU design, but they do have some special sauce as a garnish to make it work. We aim to determine if the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is the chip gamers have been yearning for and how it stacks up against other Ryzen 7000 chips (and Intel's 13th Gen) in our test suite.

The U.S. government is set to green-light a more aggressive ‘hack-back’ approach to dealing with foreign adversaries and mandatory regulation of critical infrastructure vendors.

The post US National Cyber Strategy Pushes Regulation, Aggressive Hack-Back Operations appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Hugh Jackman's Wolverine is a man of few words ... but many growls. Until 2021, the actor held the title for having the "longest career as a live-action Marvel character," seriously, Jackman has portrayed the mutant superhero for a long, long time. Although the 2000 "X-Men" film was the Australian actor's big breakthrough as an entertainer, Jackman has been a Broadway star for much longer.

Even before he landed the role that transformed his career forever, he had been nominated for an Olivier Award for his performance in an "Oklahoma!" production and had an established career on stage. Playing Wolverine wasn't an easy job for Jackman — he had relatively fewer lines and had to convey many emotions — particularly an animal rage that seemed suitable for the character. Wolverine's a pretty feral guy. He has claws. And he growls. Even though Jackman's performances on stage won him a Tony Award a few years later, he continued filming Wolverine's animalistic growls for a long time ... which cause some serious damage to his voice.

'My Falsetto Is Not As Strong'

Hugh Jackman recently finished a triumphant run on "The Music Man" on Broadway, but the actor doesn't think his voice is how it used to be. In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Front Row (via Deadline), the actor shared that he had damaged his voice by playing Wolverine. Jackman joked about how his drama school teacher would have been "horrified" at all his growling.

"My teacher at drama school would have been horrified by some of the things I did in Wolverine ... I've done some damage to my voice, through playing Wolverine."

Jackman believes all the roaring he did as Wolverine has harmed his skill set. With a lot of training, he was able to commit to his song and dance pieces in the stage world and on the big screen — but the consequences of playing Wolverine are just something he has to live with. Judging from what the actor has to say, he seems convinced the part altered his ability to sing.

"My falsetto is not as strong as it used to be, and I put that down directly to some of the growling and yelling I did."

Hugh Jackman Will Step Into The Role Once Again

The actor is "working on" making his voice better, though. He trains hard for every role, engaging in the necessary physical fitness regime and vocal preparation ahead of time. 

"I work with a singing teacher and I try not to hurt myself. I put a lot of effort into both physical movement and my vocal preparation for every role."

Jackman will once again return to playing the mutant superhero in "Deadpool 3" alongside Ryan Reynolds' titular character, for which his training will begin soon. The actor has six months to focus on getting back into shape as Wolverine after finishing his performances of "The Music Man." "Deadpool 3" will be the tenth film Jackman will reprise his role as the mutant, since first playing the character in the 2000 movie. It's a huge feat — and something the actor takes evidently takes seriously!

Read this next: 12 Awesome Action Movies That Never Got Sequels

The post Playing Wolverine Permanently Damaged Hugh Jackman's Tony Award-Winning Voice appeared first on /Film.

Web hosting giant GoDaddy made headlines this month when it disclosed that a multi-year breach allowed intruders to steal company source code, siphon customer and employee login credentials, and foist malware on customer websites. Media coverage understandably focused on GoDaddy’s admission that it suffered three different cyberattacks over as many years at the hands of the same hacking group.  But it’s worth revisiting how this group typically got in to targeted companies: By calling employees and tricking them into navigating to a phishing website.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), GoDaddy said it determined that the same “sophisticated threat actor group” was responsible for three separate intrusions, including:

-March 2020: A spear-phishing attack on a GoDaddy employee compromised the hosting login credentials of approximately 28,000 GoDaddy customers, as well as login credentials for a small number employees;

-November 2021: A compromised GoDaddy password let attackers steal source code and information tied to 1.2 million customers, including website administrator passwords, sFTP credentials, and private SSL keys;

-December 2022: Hackers gained access to and installed malware on GoDaddy’s cPanel hosting servers that “intermittently redirected random customer websites to malicious sites.”

“Based on our investigation, we believe these incidents are part of a multi-year campaign by a sophisticated threat actor group that, among other things, installed malware on our systems and obtained pieces of code related to some services within GoDaddy,” the company stated in its SEC filing.

What else do we know about the cause of these incidents? We don’t know much about the source of the November 2021 incident, other than GoDaddy’s statement that it involved a compromised password, and that it took about two months for the company to detect the intrusion. GoDaddy has not disclosed the source of the breach in December 2022 that led to malware on some customer websites.

But we do know the March 2020 attack was precipitated by a spear-phishing attack against a GoDaddy employee. GoDaddy described the incident at the time in general terms as a social engineering attack, but one of its customers affected by that March 2020 breach actually spoke to one of the hackers involved.

The hackers were able to change the Domain Name System (DNS) records for the transaction brokering site escrow.com so that it pointed to an address in Malaysia that was host to just a few other domains, including the then brand-new phishing domain servicenow-godaddy[.]com.

The general manager of Escrow.com found himself on the phone with one of the GoDaddy hackers, after someone who claimed they worked at GoDaddy called and said they needed him to authorize some changes to the account.

In reality, the caller had just tricked a GoDaddy employee into giving away their credentials, and he could see from the employee’s account that Escrow.com required a specific security procedure to complete a domain transfer.

The general manager of Escrow.com said he suspected the call was a scam, but decided to play along for about an hour — all the while recording the call and coaxing information out of the scammer.

“This guy had access to the notes, and knew the number to call,” to make changes to the account, the CEO of Escrow.com told KrebsOnSecurity. “He was literally reading off the tickets to the notes of the admin panel inside GoDaddy.”

About halfway through this conversation — after being called out by the general manager as an imposter — the hacker admitted that he was not a GoDaddy employee, and that he was in fact part of a group that enjoyed repeated success with social engineering employees at targeted companies over the phone.

Absent from GoDaddy’s SEC statement is another spate of attacks in November 2020, in which unknown intruders redirected email and web traffic for multiple cryptocurrency services that used GoDaddy in some capacity.

It is possible this incident was not mentioned because it was the work of yet another group of intruders. But in response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity at the time, GoDaddy said that incident also stemmed from a “limited” number of GoDaddy employees falling for a sophisticated social engineering scam.

“As threat actors become increasingly sophisticated and aggressive in their attacks, we are constantly educating employees about new tactics that might be used against them and adopting new security measures to prevent future attacks,” GoDaddy said in a written statement back in 2020.

Voice phishing or “vishing” attacks typically target employees who work remotely. The phishers will usually claim that they’re calling from the employer’s IT department, supposedly to help troubleshoot some issue. The goal is to convince the target to enter their credentials at a website set up by the attackers that mimics the organization’s corporate email or VPN portal.

Experts interviewed for an August 2020 story on a steep rise in successful voice phishing attacks said there are generally at least two people involved in each vishing scam: One who is social engineering the target over the phone, and another co-conspirator who takes any credentials entered at the phishing page — including multi-factor authentication codes shared by the victim — and quickly uses them to log in to the company’s website.

The attackers are usually careful to do nothing with the phishing domain until they are ready to initiate a vishing call to a potential victim. And when the attack or call is complete, they disable the website tied to the domain.

This is key because many domain registrars will only respond to external requests to take down a phishing website if the site is live at the time of the abuse complaint. This tactic also can stymie efforts by companies that focus on identifying newly-registered phishing domains before they can be used for fraud.

GoDaddy’s latest SEC filing indicates the company had nearly 7,000 employees as of December 2022. In addition, GoDaddy contracts with another 3,000 people who work full-time for the company via business process outsourcing companies based primarily in India, the Philippines and Colombia.

Many companies now require employees to supply a one-time password — such as one sent via SMS or produced by a mobile authenticator app — in addition to their username and password when logging in to company assets online. But both SMS and app-based codes can be undermined by phishing attacks that simply request this information in addition to the user’s password.

One multifactor option — physical security keys — appears to be immune to these advanced scams. The most commonly used security keys are inexpensive USB-based devices. A security key implements a form of multi-factor authentication known as Universal 2nd Factor (U2F), which allows the user to complete the login process simply by inserting the USB device and pressing a button on the device. The key works without the need for any special software drivers.

The allure of U2F devices for multi-factor authentication is that even if an employee who has enrolled a security key for authentication tries to log in at an impostor site, the company’s systems simply refuse to request the security key if the user isn’t on their employer’s legitimate website, and the login attempt fails. Thus, the second factor cannot be phished, either over the phone or Internet.

In July 2018, Google disclosed that it had not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical security keys in place of one-time codes.

May I have your attention, please? May I have your attention, please?

We are proud to announce the first release of the year 2023. Please welcome ScummVM 2.7.0 – "The Real Slim Shader".

New games

Once again, the number of available games increased substantially thanks to new engines, as well as incredible improvements across older engines.

With ScummVM 2.7.0, we officially announce support for the following games:

• Soldier Boyz
• Obsidian
• Pink Panther: Passport to Peril
• Pink Panther: Hokus Pokus Pink
• Adibou 2 "Environment", "Read/Count 4 & 5" and "Read/Count 6 & 7"
• Driller/Space Station Oblivion
• Halls of the Dead: Faery Tale Adventure II
• Chop Suey, Eastern Mind, and 16 other Director 3 and Director 4 titles

Improved support for Broken Sword series

We vastly improved the detection method used for the Broken Sword series as well. Compared to the old detection method, this allows a much higher level of granularity, so we are now able to detect even the slightest differences between all the supported versions. We tried our very best to add all available game versions, but we need your help. If you notice that your version of Broken Sword 1 or 2 is not properly detected in ScummVM 2.7.0, please get in touch with us and report your version to our Bug Tracker!

New localizations

One of our goals is to support as many localized game versions as possible, so people can enjoy the games in their native language. This time, we added support for the Chinese, Japanese and Korean versions of many games, including Beneath a Steel Sky, Inherit the Earth and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

New and revived platforms

Additionally, we proved ScummVM’s portability again by adding (or bringing back) support for numerous new platforms and devices:

• RetroMini RS90 (using OpenDingux)
• 1st generation Miyoo (New BittBoy, Pocket Go and PowKiddy Q90-V90-Q20) with TriForceX MiyooCFW
• Miyoo Mini
• KolibriOS
• 26-bit versions of RISC OS
• Nintendo 3DS

Of course, stable platforms deserve some love as well! We are very proud to announce that support for iOS and Android devices got vastly improved for 2.7.0! We don’t want to spoil everything that we have in mind for the future with these platforms, but stay tuned — it will be awesome.

Shader-based scalers

Ah, yes, the release codename. Glad you asked. The new release provides a way to run your games with visual accuracy like you've never seen before. Do you remember the warm glow of CRTs shining on your face? Get that experience back thanks to the introduction of shader-based scalers!

ScummVM 2.7.0 already ships with a curated set of shaders we carefully hand-picked from LibRetro’s shader collection. A more comprehensive set is available as an additional download from within the application itself.

Pre-defined random number seeds

Our speedrun community can now take advantage of a new feature that allows setting a predefined seed for ScummVM’s internal random number generator. Using a predefined seed now provides the ability to have reproducible runs over and over again. Pick a seed, set your route and you are good to go!

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Check out the full Release Notes for a comprehensive summary of how our developers managed to create yet another amazing ScummVM release!

You can find all of this goodness available for a number of platforms on our downloads page. If you are using Windows, macOS, or either the Ubuntu Snap or Flatpack packages, the autoupdater will assist you in updating to ScummVM 2.7.0.

As always, thank you for your continued support and happy adventuring!

Writer and director Frank Darabont is known for his celebrated adaptations of Stephen King's "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile," but his film version of King's novella "The Mist" has one of the most harrowing and divisive endings in contemporary horror cinema. "The Mist" follows the tough everyman David Drayton and his young son Billy when they go to a supermarket after a severe thunderstorm in the lakeside town of Bridgton, Maine. They become trapped in the store by a strange, overpowering mist that hides deadly monsters.

The singular setting of the grocery store serves as a microcosm for society, particularly how conflicting groups of people — level-headed seekers of justice, hot-tempered aggressors, or holy rollers — instill fears in others or try to work together. "The Mist" is a searing portrayal of humanity's capacity to unite as a team or tear each other apart.

If anything, "The Mist" holds even more resonance today as the gulf between political spectrums and world viewpoints widen amidst the pandemic. The whole thing culminates in perhaps the film's scariest scene -- its gut-wrenching and hotly-debated ending, which vastly differs from that for King's novella.

The Difference Between The Endings

Stephen King ends "The Mist" with David Drayton possibly hearing civilization on the radio and telling his son the words: "One of them is Hartford, the other is hope." King told Yahoo! Entertainment in 2017 how he felt about Frank Darabont's own radical and depressing vision for the denouement:

"When Frank was interested in 'The Mist,' one of the things that he insisted on was that it would have some kind of an ending, which the story doesn't have — it just sort of peters off into nothing, where these people are stuck in the mist, and they're out of gas, and the monsters are around, and you don't know what's going to happen next. When Frank said that he wanted to do the ending that he was going to do, I was totally down with that."

In the film, Drayton, his son, and other friends escape the supermarket and drive into the ominous mist until they run out of gas. Rather than fight the veiled monsters, they make the despairing decision to end their lives. The only problem is they do not have enough bullets for everyone in the car.

Darabont's camera travels across their somber faces in tense close-ups while they accept their grave choice. Next, he cuts to a wide shot of the car in the middle of the mist as the shots bang out in quick succession. When he returns to the inside of the car, the sight of the bloodied, dead bodies behind the traumatized Drayton is absolutely chilling. Then, in a cruel twist of fate, Drayton emerges from the car to find the mist clearing and military tanks coming to the rescue.

An Anti-Hollywood Ending

Stephen King defended the film's grim ending as "terrific" because it was "so anti-Hollywood — anti-everything, really! It was nihilistic. I liked that." In the oral history of the "The Mist" for /Film, Frank Darabont recalls his hesitation to change King's original ending. He wanted to make sure the author approved of the new direction he was taking his story:

"I put it in his hands. And he wrote back and he said, 'I read it. I love your ending. I'm sorry I didn't think of it, because I would've written that instead.' [...] [H]e said, 'We need movies that dare to piss people off.'"

Darabont's ending whallops the audience with a greater punch than King originally envisioned. It is a daring subversion of Hollywood expectations because the hero makes the wrong choice and ultimately fails. Most films, even in the horror or apocalypse genres, offer the audience somewhat of an uplifting conclusion. Darabont's bleak ending is more memorable because, as he says, "It's not tied up in a nice bow and there's just this reassuring happy Hallmark bumper sticker thing."

The Legacy Of The Ending

Stephen King may have loved Frank Darabont's changes, but initially audiences did not react the same way. In his interview with Yahoo! Entertainment, King recalled how "[T]he critics and fans both kind of excoriated him. [...] And now, when you read retrospective pieces about 'The Mist,' people are, 'Wow, that's one of the great ones.' They like it. They just had to get used to it." Critics in 2007 described "The Mist" as "endless torture and [a series of] inhumanly cruel jokes" (via NJ.com) and "twisted to cynical and dispiriting ends" (via Newsday).

Part of the divisive reception was due to the film's ill-timed Thanksgiving weekend release, when "everybody has a great feast and then, as a family, goes to the movies. [...] People want to go see 'Elf.' They want to see Christmas movies. They don't want to see flesh-eating tentacles and this hopeless, despair-filled movie," Darabont argues in /Film's oral history.

Darabont wanted the ending to "The Mist" to be as brutal as those for horror classics like "Night of the Living Dead" (where the hero is mistaken for a zombie and killed) or the ending of "The Thing" (where the characters resign to their fate of freezing to death, with the monster possibly still inside one of them). Yet, at the same time, /Film writer Joshua Meyer shrewdly points out in his dissection of the scariest Stephen King scenes that the dismal conclusion of "The Mist" is "almost life-affirming" because it implores audiences to never give up. /Film writer Jeremy Smith also elaborates on the the importance of hope in "The Mist." Through Drayton's fatal error, viewers learn they should never succumb to panic and hysteria, even when their destiny is uncertain and everything seems doomed.

Read this next: All 59 Stephen King Movies Ranked From Worst To Best

The post Why Stephen King Defends The Mist's 'Terrific' Yet Divisive Ending appeared first on /Film.

Dennis Quaid spent the entirety of the 1980s on the cusp of movie stardom. He popped as a cocksure Indiana yokel in Peter Yates' 1979 underdog drama "Breaking Away," commencing a flirtation that bopped from Mercury Seven astronaut Gordon Cooper in "The Right Stuff" to corrupt New Orleans cop Remy McSwain in "The Big Easy" to The Killer himself, Jerry Lee Lewis, in "Great Balls of Fire." Hollywood thought it knew what to do with Dennis Quaid, but the troublemaking Texan armed with a million-dollar grin had other ideas.

Quaid was cut from the same restless cloth as Jeff Bridges. He's a movie star with an actor's temperament. He could show up on set, hit his marks, flash that come-and-get-it smile and cash an eight-figure check, but in the prime of his career he sought out audience-unfriendly areas of discomfort via decidedly unheroic characters. He's properly pathetic as a college football god who's reduced to painfully-human mediocrity in "Everybody's All-American," and despicable as a drug-dispensing producer in "Postcards from the Edge." Whereas a bona-fide matinee idol like Harrison Ford played aggressively against type as the terrifying Allie Fox in "The Mosquito Coast," Quaid weaponized his charm. He dared us to not like him.

It was a nifty trick, but we eventually got wise to it. So he hurled us another curveball and went full-on method actor, dropping 40 pounds and completely disappearing as Doc Holliday in Lawrence Kasdan's "Wyatt Earp."

A Figuratively And Dangerously Literal Disappearing Act

When Lawrence Kasdan found himself in a release-date footrace with Touchstone's star-studded Wyatt Earp crowd-pleaser "Tombstone," he hung back and finished his three-hour epic on his own time. Warner Bros. trusted the four-time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker of "The Big Chill" and "The Accidental Tourist" to deliver a superior take on the Wild West lawmaker's life. The secret weapon of Kasdan's film was Dennis Quaid, whose physical commitment to the part of Holliday smacked of Robert De Niro playing Jake LaMotta. It came at a horrible price.

As Quaid told The Scotsman in 2017:

"It affects your self image. I lost [42 pounds] for 'Wyatt Earp' and I was always thinking that I hadn't done enough. But I look back at pictures and you could see my skull. I did it because Doc Holliday was a scrawny little guy, he had tuberculosis, and I wanted to get as close to him as I could. But you get into a way of eating and you're counting your calories and it puts you in a way of thinking. It took me about two years to really get clear of it and gain the weight back."

A Masterful Performance Embedded In A Muddled Epic

Though the studio got the sweeping, Oscar-friendly version of the Earp tale they paid for (to the tune of $63 million), the refreshingly unpretentious "Tombstone" proved a hit with audiences, in large part due to Val Kilmer's hugely sympathetic portrayal of Holliday. It had been nearly 50 years since Victor Mature gave us the defining take on the dentist-turned-gunfighter in John Ford's "My Darling Clementine," and Kilmer, who'd been scrambling plenty on his own as a movie star post-"The Doors," reminded us why we loved him. The dialogue wasn't fancy, but his delivery (particularly on "I'm your Huckleberry") nailed down Holliday for a new generation.

Though Lawrence Kasdan hampered his cast by deciding to make an epic Western without having anything of interest to say, Dennis Quad wrote his own story with his portrayal, and his Holliday is so much more than a compendium of coughs and quips. It's the soulful counterpart to Kilmer's entertainingly hammy turn. Quaid's Doc is a self-destructive enigma strangely determined to do something meaningful in this world before tuberculosis does what no outlaw could do. He's dying on his own terms, and we're happy to ride along as he completes his mystifying journey. It's Quaid's finest hour as an actor, and of course he knocked it out in a movie that almost no one has seen.

Read this next: The 20 Best Westerns Of All Time

The post Losing 40lbs For Wyatt Earp Affected Dennis Quaid Long After Shooting Was Done appeared first on /Film.

Pennsylvania State University has an announcement. "Six massive galaxies discovered in the early universe are upending what scientists previously understood about the origins of galaxies in the universe." "These objects are way more massiveâ than anyone expected," said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, who modeled light from these galaxies. "We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we've discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe." Using the first dataset released from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the international team of scientists discovered objects as mature as the Milky Way when the universe was only 3% of its current age, about 500-700 million years after the Big Bang.... In a paper published February 22 in Nature, the researchers show evidence that the six galaxies are far more massive than anyone expected and call into question what scientists previously understood about galaxy formation at the very beginning of the universe. "The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science," said Leja. "We've been informally calling these objects 'universe breakers' — and they have been living up to their name so far." Leja explained that the galaxies the team discovered are so massive that they are in tension with 99% of models for cosmology. Accounting for such a high amount of mass would require either altering the models for cosmology or revising the scientific understanding of galaxy formation in the early universe — that galaxies started as small clouds of stars and dust that gradually grew larger over time. Either scenario requires a fundamental shift in our understanding of how the universe came to be, he added. "We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find," Leja said. "It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question." "My first thought was we had made a mistake and we would just find it and move on with our lives," Leja says in the statement. "But we have yet to find that mistake, despite a lot of trying." "While the data indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes. Regardless, the amount of mass we discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. Even if we cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change." Phys.org got a more detailed explantion from one of the paper's co-authors: It took our home galaxy the entire life of the universe for all its stars to assemble. For this young galaxy to achieve the same growth in just 700 million years, it would have had to grow around 20 times faster than the Milky Way, said Labbe, a researcher at Australia's Swinburne University of Technology. For there to be such massive galaxies so soon after the Big Bang goes against the current cosmological model which represents science's best understanding of how the universe works. According to theory, galaxies grow slowly from very small beginnings at early times," Labbe said, adding that such galaxies were expected to be between 10 to 100 times smaller. But the size of these galaxies "really go off a cliff," he said.... The newly discovered galaxies could indicate that things sped up far faster in the early universe than previously thought, allowing stars to form "much more efficiently," said David Elbaz, an astrophysicist at the French Atomic Energy Commission not involved in the research. is could be linked to recent signs that the universe itself is expanding faster than we once believed, he added. This subject sparks fierce debate among cosmologists, making this latest discovery "all the more exciting, because it is one more indication that the model is cracking," Elbaz said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Everyone who worked with James Gandolfini on the cast of "The Sopranos" sings his praises loudly and proudly. The generous and charming actor became friendly with just about everyone on the show, but even he got into arguments with his co-stars from time to time. The show involved a lot of intense back-and-forth, but perhaps no one butted heads with Gandolfini's character Tony as much as his sister Janice. As it turns out, the actress who played Janice, Aida Turturro, liked to push Gandolfini's buttons in real life, too.

"I knew him from 1992 and we used to fight back then, not really fight, but we were like husband and wife," Turturro told the New York Post. "I fell in love with him the first time we met; I felt like we were kindred spirits. I was like, 'Listen, you're not the boss of me, mister!' and I used to drive him crazy."

The contentious brother-sister dynamic of Tony and Janice came naturally to the two actors. Their real-life bickering mimicked a family's level of intimacy — no one can hurl insults quite like a relative.

"We were sister and brother and we understood this was how families fought," Turturro explained to Deadline. "But one of the scenes I remember so well was when Janice goes to anger management. I love that, because Tony couldn't stand that she was working on herself and was calmer and holding in the anger and you knew he was going to push her buttons. And by the end, she is screaming, 'I'll kill you!'"

Janice Went To Anger Management But Turturro Should've Gone Too

The on-screen argument after Janice's anger management classes actually became so heated that it bled into reality, as "Sopranos" co-star Steve Schirripa revealed in an interview with Turturro.

"First it was your characters arguing, but then you and Jim got into an argument," the actor recounted in Woke Up This Morning. "You got mad because you thought he wasn't looking at you, right? They were shooting your part of the scene, the camera was turned around toward you, and you wanted him to be paying attention, so you could play off him, and he was just kind of ignoring you. And you got mad."

Turturro confirmed that Schirripa's story was true. "I got really mad!" she admitted. She doesn't blame Gandolfini in retrospect, though — only her health.

"I actually was really sick that day, I swear to God," she explained. "I had some major flu or whatever it was. Jimmy was the most giving actor, so he never wasn't there. Now, maybe I was sensitive because I was ill, but I went bananas."

Turturro might have been the first one to fly off the handle, but Gandolfini matched her energy. "He got so mad at me, he walked away. He goes, 'I don't f***ing give a s***.' Everybody wasn't sure. At first, they thought it was part of the scene, and then they were like, 'I think they're really fighting!'"

The confrontation delayed the scene temporarily, but it was quickly resolved. "But in the end, it all blew over," Schirripa recalled. "You took a break and came back and you guys hugged and did the scene and you were terrific. These are the things that happen with good friends."

Gandolfini And Turturro Patched Things Up In The End

Turturro and Gandolfini may have bickered, but they loved each other like brother and sister (and compared to their Soprano counterparts, maybe a little bit better than brother and sister). As Turturro told Deadline, "we understood this was how families fought." In a way, Janice and Tony's arguments — even at their most heated — perfectly encapsulated the way that families can drive each other crazy. The anger management episode was the perfect embodiment of a family feud.

"[Tony] had to egg [Janice] on," Turturro explained. "He was like, 'I'm not going to let you be nice. You're full of s***. You're just like me and you're going down with me.'" Tony's behavior on "The Sopranos" often crossed a line — as Janice points out — but his dynamic with his sister is rooted in a familiar, universal experience.

"That [scene] came from a place we all have seen, even if families don't get to the point of screaming," Turturro said. "But we've all seen people at dinner tables and Christmas when they're attacking each other, or undermining or passive-aggressively starting fights, and you walk away thinking, well, that's just the family holiday."

Despite their bickering both on and off the show, Turturro and Gandolfini were extremely close. "He was so giving," the actress recalled. "He didn't want to be the hero. He appreciated what he got, how much he had and always, always shared it."

In the end, the actors were able to bring their real-life sibling-like rivalry to life on-screen because they had such a comfortable rapport — and immense talent.

"With James, I didn't feel like we were acting," Turturro explained in Woke Up This Morning. "We were just ... talking.

Read this next: The Best And Worst TV Couples Of 2022

The post A Sopranos Scene Between Tony and Janice Turned Into a Real-Life Shouting Match appeared first on /Film.

Rousing action films get your blood pumping and lift your spirits. In some respects, they're even more thrilling when women play the action hero. Though ladies have been kicking butt in movies for decades now, it's still just as exciting when a new woman fights her way to the big screen and into our hearts. If you're a fan of action films -– and hopefully if you're a fan of women –- you've probably seen many of this century's most popular female-led action epics. There are the "Kill Bill" films, of course, Ripley's badassery in "Aliens," and more recent fare like "Atomic Blonde" and "Mad Max: Fury Road."

These are all incredible films that certainly deserve their place in the action pantheon, but others deserve our attention, too. For one thing, there actually were a few female-led action films made before the year 2000, something you might not be aware of if you weren't alive to see them. Then there's the fact that countries other than America produced great action epics, many of which go underseen in the English-speaking world. This list could easily be filled with badass women from Hong Kong action films alone.

Variety is the spice of life, they say, so I've filled this list with a diverse supply of women-led action films to quench your righteous thirst. 

Lady Snowblood (1973)

"Lady Snowblood," a 1973 Japanese film based on the manga of the same name, ranks as an absolute killer. A classic in the vengeful-women genre, the film follows a young woman named Yuki (Meiko Kaji), who also goes by the name Lady Snowblood. Yuki was born in a woman's prison, where her mother did time for killing one of the four assailants who brutally raped her and killed her husband. Yuki, her mother's vengeance in her blood, began training as an assassin from a young age in order to carry out her familial duty.

Filmed on a relatively low budget, "Lady Snowblood" nonetheless features shocking action sequences and plenty of style. Lady Snowblood's weapon is a sword she hides inside an unassuming umbrella, which means her victims almost never suspect her. Numerous limbs are severed throughout the film and every attack results in a voluminous amount of spraying blood.

For those familiar with his work, it shouldn't come as a surprise that "Lady Snowblood" served as a major inspiration for Quentin Tarantino in the making of the "Kill Bill" movies. The look and sound of the film feel distinct –- if not familiar, considering its influence -– and Lady Snowblood herself, Meiko Kaji, performs the ominous theme song. It's an essential moment in action cinema and can always benefit from more discussion amongst contemporary action fans. 

Yes, Madam! (1985)

It'd be a crime to compose a list of the best female-led action films without including any of Michelle Yeoh's many credits, and I'm no criminal. Though younger American moviegoers might have only recently become aware of Yeoh thanks to  "Everything Everywhere All At Once," she's an absolute icon of Hong Kong action cinema and has been working steadily since the 1980s. One film that deserves more attention on this side of the world is 1985's "Yes, Madam!," which was a hit in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia but never made a huge impact in America.

Directed by prolific Hong Kong filmmaker Cory Yuen, the story centers on Inspector Ng (Yeoh), who joins forces with Scottish investigator Carrie Morris (Cynthia Rothrock) to retrieve a piece of microfilm mistakenly stolen by a group of thieves. "Yes, Madam!" was Yeoh's first starring role in a feature, and she's a force of nature despite being only 22 years old at the time. It's even more impressive that Yeoh holds her own alongside Rothrock, a veteran martial artist and holder of seven black belts.

The fight scenes are intricately choreographed, and it's a total joy to see Yeoh and Rothrock take down an entire army of bad guys with their kung-fu prowess. It's a shame Rothrock isn't more well-known outside of the industry, as she certainly deserves more recognition for her work both here and in the dozens of other films she's appeared in. Put this one on your list.

La Femme Nikita (1990)

You've probably heard of "La Femme Nikita," but I'd wager a guess that many of you haven't actually seen it. The 1990 film spawned a popular Canadian series in the 1990s as well as an (extremely underrated!) CW series starring Maggie Q, but the original is worth checking out. Directed by Luc Besson, known for films like "Leon: The Professional" and "The Fifth Element," the film stars Anne Parillaud as the title character.

A teenage junkie, Nikita robs a pharmacy one evening, killing a police officer in the process. She is sentenced to life in prison, but the government fakes her death and forces her to become an assassin. After intensive training -– including instruction from a teacher played by French screen legend Jeanne Moreau –- she eventually operates as a skilled killer, a far cry from her days as a listless junkie.

"La Femme Nikita" might not be the deepest of films, but it's great fun, and Besson's distinct style –- often called the "Cinéma du look" -– at the very least pleases the eye. Parillaud impresses in the lead role, and "La Femme Nikita" became one of the era's most influential female-led action films, spawning remakes such as "Black Cat" in Hong Kong and "Point of No Return" in America. 

Wing Chun (1994)

Considering her status as an action icon, it's only right that Michelle Yeoh features in two films on this list. The second is "Wing Chun," a 1994 film that boasts plenty of butt-kicking girl power. Yeoh plays the title character, a young woman who masters the art of kung-fu to ward off unwanted suitors. Wing Chun works at her family's tofu shop, and only she can stand up to the village's local bandits.

When a beautiful widow named Charmy (Catherine Hung) arrives in town, predators Flying Monkey (Cui Ya-hui) and Flying Chimpanzee (Norman Chui) try to snatch her up, and Wing Chun comes to the rescue. This leads Wing Chun to face off against the two baddies in a duel, during which she shows off her superior skills and protects the women of the village.

Yeoh amazes as the title character and her fighting talents are off the charts, but the film also spotlights several other formidable women. Wing Chun's relationships with the flirtatious Charmy (Kingdom Yuen), her hilariously biting and greedy aunt, and her wise kung-fu master (Cheng Pei-pei), are just as important as the romance between Wing Chun and her childhood friend (Donnie Yen). There's plenty of goofiness to be found here, but the action sequences are astounding, and these women are not to be trifled with.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

Not enough people know that Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson starred in an action movie together in the 1990s, and I want to rectify that. The film in question is 1996's "The Long Kiss Goodnight." Quite similar in plot to "The Bourne Identity," it casts Davis as Samantha, who leads a quiet life with her young daughter in a Pennsylvania town. Samantha gets in a car crash and suddenly discovers she possesses combat skills she never knew she had and begins experiencing flashbacks from her past.

She hires a private detective, Mitch (Jackson) to help her uncover the truth of who she really is and finds herself at the center of a vast government conspiracy. Davis and Jackson both prove themselves willing to go all-in with the film's madcap action and goofy dialogue. There's no half-assing anything in this total blast of an action flick. Also, in an unexpected turn of events, the film somehow predicts 9/11.

Davis, with her tall stature and can-do attitude, makes a perfect action star, and Jackson is unbeatable as her witty sidekick -- a duo we didn't know we needed, but are grateful to have been blessed with nonetheless. Whenever people say "They don't make them like this anymore," I can only hope they're including mid-budget action romps from the 1990s, where the wacky quips are many and the only goal is to have a little fun.

Run Lola Run (1998)

Talk about truth in advertising. "Run Lola Run" is a movie about running. Franka Potente plays Lola, a woman who receives a call from her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), informing her that he lost a bag of 100,000 Deutsche marks that he owes to a very bad guy. Lola has 20 minutes to come up with the money or Manni will go ahead with plan B: robbing a bank.

You might wonder how a 20-minute run takes up an entire 80-minute film. Director Tom Tykwer deploys every cinematic technique he can think of to tell the story in a unique way, resulting in a chaotic hour and change. Lola actually makes the run three different times, with tiny variations between each version hugely affecting the outcome. We also get small peeks into the fates of seemingly insignificant secondary characters, their timelines playing out in brief flashes in between all the running.

Then there's the film's style, which is as lawless as its characters. Sometimes, Lola's running becomes so frenzied that the camera can't possibly follow her movements, so a scene will switch to animation. Certain scenes are sped up, others are rewound, and sometimes the frames shift to black and white. You can't fault the film for doing exactly what it set out to do, which is to take running as its energetic subject. If anything, you might feel like you actually endured a good workout, to say nothing of Potente's impressive athletic feats.

Haywire (2011)

By my estimation, Steven Soderbergh is one of the greatest directors working today, but his 2011 film "Haywire" somehow managed to fly under the radar. The film stars former mixed martial arts artist Gina Carano, who at one point had a promising career before her political comments essentially tanked it. It's too bad, because Carano could have been the female action star we'd been waiting for. She plays Mallory Kane, a black ops agent double-crossed by her government and forced to go on the run. Trust no one, shoot first, and talk later, right? 

As a physical performer, Carano is incredibly powerful and all of the stunts -– which she handled herself -– look effortless. It's very much a martial arts film rather than a goofy action flick, and Soderbergh wastes no time on extraneous dialogue. That doesn't mean Carano is totally on her own, however, as the film has an unexpectedly stacked supporting cast: Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Antonio Banderas, and Michael Douglas.

The plot, frankly, is irrelevant, but with such great action and so talented a cast, this doesn't matter. "Haywire" is also tightly edited -- no surprise there, as Soderbergh always edits his movies himself –- and shot more like an arthouse drama than an action flick at times, giving it a unique look.

The Assassin (2015)

It's not an exaggeration to declare 2015's "The Assassin" one of the most beautifully shot action films of all time. Renowned Taiwanese helmer Hou Hsiao-hsien directed this wuxia adventure, set during China's Tang Dynasty. The titular character, ​​Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi), is a young woman raised as an assassin after being sent away from her family as a child. A failed kill prompts Yinniang's master, Jiaxin (Fang-Yi Sheu), to ship her off on an even tougher assignment: she must eliminate her cousin, Tian Ji'an (Chang Chen), a military governor and the man she was betrothed to as a girl.

Strikingly, "The Assassin" minimizes the action quotient. Yinniang spends much of the time laying in wait, spying on her targets from behind curtains and up in trees while they discuss their circumstances. Thus, the film moves at quite a languid pace, though when the fighting does commence, these sequences are as visually arresting as the moments of quiet observation.

Every frame in "The Assassin" is perfectly composed. Much of the film was shot in Inner Mongolia, and the landscapes captured therein are breathtaking. The movie is filled with lush wide shots as well as intimate interior shots, the latter of which are sometimes veiled by wispy curtains that hide Yinniang's unceasing presence. Shot on 35mm, the rich colors are strikingly crisp and each frame feels almost delicate. To non-Chinese audiences, the plot might be somewhat difficult to follow, but that kind of visual elegance needs no translation.

Revenge (2017)

The rape-revenge film has courted controversy since it first burst into the horror genre in the 1970s. The reasons for this are abundant. For one thing, men pioneered the genre, and these films –- such as "I Spit on Your Grave" -– seem to take perverse pleasure in the woman's brutalization before her inevitable revenge. Coralie Fargeat's sharp and provocative debut, "Revenge," keeps this history in mind and creates something new, what one might call a feminist take on the subject. 

We set our sights on Jen, (Matilda Lutz), a young woman vacationing in the desert with her married boyfriend, Richard (Kevin Janssens). Richard's friends arrive early and ruin their romantic getaway, and one guy rapes Jen while the other watches. Richard wants Jen to forget about the incident but she refuses, running into the desert as the three men give chase. What follows is a brutal story of survival and transformation.

Unlike past films of this sort, the perspective of Fargeat's cinematic tale is made explicit. The rape itself is not sexualized and instead implicates the viewer in the voyeuristic spectacle. Film critic Mary Beth McAndrews calls the look of the film the "transformational gaze," as it compels the viewer to shift how they think about the protagonist while she reinvents herself both physically and mentally. It's certainly not for the faint of heart -– much of Jen's transformation involves her brutalized body –- but it's a thrilling take on exploitation and what lies beyond female objectification.

The Villainess (2017)

"The Villainess" forces the viewer into an adrenaline rush. Consider the film's opening sequence. A young woman enters a building and quickly kills dozens of assailants in a hallway. Around every corner, more men await, but she defeats them all. She steps into another room only to be met by a dozen more men, ready to fight. They're all dead in minutes. The first several moments are filmed POV-style, so we only see this woman's hands as she loads and unloads her gun. The camera switches to a wider angle when the woman smashes against a mirror, and we finally glimpse her small yet formidable figure.

The young woman in question is Sook-hee (Kim Ok-vin), a trained assassin. The brutal cold open recalls the famous fight scene in "Oldboy," only even longer and more deadly. Unfortunately, after Sook-hee's incredible victory, she's captured by an organization that wants to turn her into an assassin -- again. The ensuing narrative echoes the story of "La Femme Nikita," though with several even more violent twists and turns.

I won't go too much into the plot, but suffice it to say the action is jaw-dropping. From the opening sequence, which I've already outlined, to the final fight which involves Sook-hee attaching herself to a moving bus using an ax, there's very little time to catch one's breath. And when there isn't any fighting going on, there are plot developments as demented as they are heartbreaking. Survival is a bloody, devastating business.

Read this next: 12 Awesome Action Movies That Never Got Sequels

The post 10 Underrated Female-Led Action Movies You Need to See appeared first on /Film.

When Tom Cruise gets choked up during his reunion scene with Val Kilmer in "Top Gun: Maverick," those are some real tears you're seeing in his eyes. Kilmer's return as Iceman, onetime rival of Maverick in the Top Gun program, is relegated to a single scene, but it's one that was packed with emotion for both moviegoers and Cruise as he was filming it.

In real life, Kilmer's speaking ability has been affected by throat cancer treatments; it's only toward the end of his scene that he we hear him utter a few lines of dialogue. Director Joseph Kosinski told USA Today that Kilmer's "voice was digitally altered and blended a little bit just for clarity" in "Top Gun: Maverick." Before Iceman stands up from his desk, speaks, and shares a hug with Maverick, Cruise's protagonist is left sitting across from him and the typed message, "It's time to let go."

Iceman, the fighter-pilot-turned-admiral, sits silent as Maverick talks through his feelings, fighting back tears and allowing a moment of quiet drama to invade the action movie. In a recent TV appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" (via The Hollywood Reporter), Cruise responded to a clip from the reunion scene: 

"I just want to say, that was pretty emotional. I've known Val for decades, and for him to come back and play that character — he's such a powerful actor that he instantly became that character again. You're looking at Iceman."

When Kimmel pointed out that Cruise appears to really be crying in the scene, the actor confessed, "I was crying. I got emotional. He's such a brilliant actor, and I love his work."

Not A Dry Eye In The Multiplex

Above, you can see Tom Cruise's full appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" His comments about Val Kilmer begin right around the 10-minute mark.

"Top Gun: Maverick" has become the rare blockbuster legacy sequel to score six Academy Award nominations, including ones for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. The writing nomination, shared by Peter Craig and John Marks, was especially surprising, given how much the film's third act plays like an uncredited remake of "Star Wars: A New Hope" and its climactic trench run on the Death Star. Editor Eddie Hamilton, who is also up for an Oscar, confirmed to /Film that the filmmakers "were all joking about the thermal exhaust port right below the main port [in 'Star Wars'] all the time."

"Top Gun: Maverick" is also deeply indebted to the original "Top Gun," directed by the late Tony Scott. It starts out the same way, aboard an aircraft carrier with Kenny Loggins music, and hits many of the same beats along the way — right down to the game of "dog fight football" in place of beach volleyball. Notwithstanding its overt similarities to other movies, however, "Top Gun: Maverick" clearly registered with audiences, who helped it rake in almost $1.5 billion at the box office, surpassing "Avengers: Infinity War" (and later, its Marvel-movie cousin, "Black Panther") to become the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time domestically, according to The Numbers.

As our spoiler review observes, "Top Gun: Maverick" puts you "right back in the 'Danger Zone,' or maybe just the audience's comfort zone." That's a good place to be when Kilmer is onscreen. His presence infuses the movie with some real emotion, leaving the viewer, like Iceman himself, thinking but perhaps most importantly feeling, "You can be my wingman anytime."

Read this next: The Best Action Movies Of 2022, Ranked

The post Val Kilmer's Return As Iceman In Top Gun: Maverick Made Tom Cruise Cry appeared first on /Film.

This interview regarding one of the victims of the University of Idaho killings having a Bluetooth speaker in her room brings up a very important aspect of digital forensic analysis; that technology that we know little about is very pervasive in our lives. While the interview centers around the alleged killer's smart phone, the same concept applies to Windows systems, and specifically mobile systems such as laptops and tablets. Very often, there are remnants or artifacts left over as a result of prior activity (user interaction, connected devices, etc.) that we may not be aware of, and in more than a few instances, these artifacts may exist well beyond the deletion of applications.

The review embargo for the new AMD Zen 4 CPUs with 3D V-Cache will be lifted on February 27th. However, the first gaming benchmarks for the flagship model, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, have appeared online. On one hand, we have some first-party official gaming benchmarks, coming directly from AMD. AMD claims that the Ryzen … Continue reading First AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D gaming benchmarks surface online →

The post First AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D gaming benchmarks surface online appeared first on DSOGaming.

We're here to talk a lot about angry forest creatures, whether ursine or cannibalistic, Wo Long and the challenges of making accessible hard games, and a lot more, including some of your questions.  This week's music:  Static-X - Terrible Lie

More than 126,000 Californians are without electricity, reports ABC News. But Reuters notes that meanwhile "more than 400,000 customers of Detroit based DTE Energy remained without power on Saturday, the Detroit News reported," suffering through "a separate storm that clobbered the U.S. Plains, Midwest and Great Lakes regions earlier this week" that finally moved over the Atlantic. And ABC News notes that as of Saturday morning, "more than 30 million Americans are under weather alerts in the West" — roughly 1 in 11 Americans — "ranging from blizzard warnings in the mountains near Los Angeles to wind chill alerts in the Northern Plains" near Wyoming. But California's problems came from its own major storm that delivered heavy snow, record rainfall, and damaging winds — a storm that "will be moving from southern California across the entire country over the next few days, eventually moving northeast by Tuesday." The Los Angeles area saw record rainfall on Friday, and it came along with 50- to 70-mile-per-hour winds. Burbank, California, saw 4.6 inches of rain Friday — stranding cars in floods and causing dozens of flight delays and cancellations. Records for daily rainfall were also set at the Los Angeles International Airport and the cities of Fresno, Bakersfield, Modesto and Oxnard.... Multiple stretches of I-5 in Los Angeles County were shuttered on Saturday due to rain and snow. Snowflakes even fell around the "Hollywood" sign, reports Reuters. But bad weather wasn't just hitting southern California: In Northern California, San Francisco was expected to experience record cold temperatures on Saturday, and the National Weather Service warned residents of the state capital of Sacramento to avoid travel from Sunday through Wednesday as rain and snow started up again after a reprieve on Saturday. "Extreme impacts from heavy snow & winds will cause extremely dangerous to impossible driving conditions & likely widespread road closures & infrastructure impacts!" the agency said on Twitter. The next set of storms, expected to hit on Sunday, will bring wind gusts of up to 50 miles per hour (80 kph) in the Sacramento Valley, and up to 70 miles per hour in the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains.... A massive low-pressure system driven from the Arctic was responsible for the unusual conditions, said Bryan Jackson, a forecaster at the NWS Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland. This week one political cartoonist suggested a connection between "crazy weather" and climate change.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

cricketcat9:

ms-cellanies:

lostsometime:

modern-politics111:

https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/irs-complaint-process-tax-exempt-organizations

3. Nature of violation

• Directors/Officers/Persons are using income/assets for personal gain
• Organization is engaged in commercial, for-profit business activities
• Income/Assets are being used to support illegal or terrorist activities
• Organization is involved in a political campaign
• Organization is engaged in excessive lobbying activities
• Organization refused to disclose or provide a copy of Form 990
• Organization failed to report employment, income or excise tax liability properly
• Organization failed to file required federal tax returns and forms
• Organization engaged in deceptive or improper fundraising practices
• Other (describe)

to simplify: churches are forbidden to promote specific political parties or candidates, in order to maintain tax-exempt status.  no religious institution is allowed to make explicit political statements, including “this party is bad,” “this party is good,” “you should vote for x,” “you should not vote for x,” or “let’s raise money for x political party or campaign.”  all of those things are super illegal!  if they’re going to act as a political entity, they need to pay taxes like any other political entity!  report their asses!!!!

MAKE THIS GO VIRAL - REBLOG IT ….. REPEATEDLY

My American followers, please do your part

Rian Johnson's Peacock series "Poker Face" has had some serious talent both in front of the camera and behind-the-scenes, but episode 8, "The Orpheus Syndrome," employed the talents of one of the greatest special effects masters in Hollywood history. 

The episode featured the work of visual effects legend Phil Tippett, who helped bring the creatures of "Star Wars" to life and won his first Academy Award for his work on "Return of the Jedi." Tippett, who has worked in the industry for decades, provided all of the models and set pieces for the episode, which centers around a special effects artist named Arthur (Nick Nolte) who feels guilty about a tragic death on a production years before. Arthur's workshop is the stuff of dreams and nightmares, with Tippett creations peeking from every nook and cranny. We eventually get to see them in motion, and when we do, Tippett's special brand of movie (and TV) magic is fully revealed. 

In an interview with The Wrap, Tippett shared the story of how he ended up working on the Peacock series and what kinds of requests Johnson had for him and his team. He also revealed the special bond he developed with series star Natasha Lyonne, born out of the desire to be left the heck alone, which sounds a lot like the bond Lyonne's character Charlie develops with Arthur. They always say that art imitates life, but sometimes it goes both ways. 

Star Wars, Stop Motion, And A Murder Mystery

Tippett and Johnson first got to know one another when Johnson was working on "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" at Skywalker Ranch, which is near where Tippett lives. The two bonded over a mutual love of stop-motion animation and became friends, so when Johnson started working on "Poker Face" and realized he wanted an episode with stop motion in it, he reached out to Tippett. Johnson explained that he wanted to do an episode based around stop-motion animation and a stop-motion animator, but he and Lyonne (who helped create the series) gave Tippett free reign:

"He had some ideas when we met with both he and Natasha Lyonne over Zoom and discussed what they had in mind, which was to have based stop-motion characters around certain mythological creatures. We made them and shot them. Rian pretty much gave us carte blanche on it. He just said, once it was established what these things needed to do and where they were going to be and what the lighting was, he just said, 'Do your magic.' We didn't get any notes. We just delivered. He just said, 'Deliver as final shots.' That was it."

There are few words in this world more incredible to a creative than "do your magic." (Seriously, they're up there with "invoice paid" and "pitch accepted.") Having carte blanche to do whatever you want in a project, with a budget, is the dream. In return, Tippett gave Johnson and the "Poker Face" audience some seriously cool creations. 

A Menagerie Of Monsters

The mythological creatures that Tippett created for "Poker Face" bear some resemblance to the creations the artist made for his massive personal project, "Mad God," which is wonderful. They have that Tippett mark, that stamp of his creative touch, and they're also just really stinking cool. For "The Orpheus Syndrome," Tippett created several creatures, including a man with a camera for a head, a red-light monster that reminds me of old-school submarine helmets, a mangy Cerberus, and a head with a woman bursting forth from it. It's wild stuff on top of some very realistic practical special effects work, like a bust recreation of an actor's face, showing the full spectrum of Tippett's incredible skills. 

It took Tippett 30 years to make "Mad God" and get it distributed, but I'm thrilled that more people will finally be able to discover his work. Many probably already know his work from movies like "Star Wars," "RoboCop," and "Jurassic Park," but they've never learned his name because special effects work unfortunately goes largely uncelebrated. Maybe "Poker Face" can get people interested in this vital craft, and creatives like Tippett can finally get the respect they deserve. "Mad God" nearly drove poor Tippett a bit mad himself, but it did give him something to talk about with Lyonne when the two bonded on set. 

Bonding Over Brutal Projects

When on the set of "Poker Face," Tippett said he would go take his lunch break by himself in order to not be bothered with "Star Wars" questions and things of that sort. He would take his lunch and go into the barn on set and eat, and it turns out Lyonne had a very similar idea. The two ended up chatting about their toughest projects and bonding over their experiences:

"We spent the lunch hour just having this great conversation. We bonded over her experience on 'Russian Doll' and mine on 'Mad God.' They were very, very similar, because both of those shows totally broke us as human beings. Really, seriously, psych ward, rehab-type stuff because we just dump everything into it and you don't meet too many people that you can share that kind of experience with, as in none. I would bum cigarettes from her and we would spend a really enjoyable hour."

Oh, to be a fly on that barn wall. Lyonne took over as showrunner on season 2 of the Netflix series "Russian Doll" while also writing, directing, and starring in the series, so it was a grueling experience that must have taken a lot out of her. (She even learned Hungarian!) Diamonds are forged under high pressure, though, and both "Mad God" and "Russian Doll" are true gems. 

New episodes of "Poker Face" debut on Thursdays, exclusively on Peacock.

Read this next: The Best Animation For Adults Of 2022

The post Star Wars VFX Legend Phil Tippett Helped with Poker Face's Stop-Motion Animation Episode appeared first on /Film.

The PlayStation 2 is a nostalgic console to many people, but emulating it can be difficult. If you don't mod your console and dump the BIOS, you won't be able to emulate games through the likes of AetherSX2. Now, it turns out that it's possible to download and extract a BIOS from the official PS3 firmware with just a little bit of work.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's conquering of America truly is an unbelievable story. As comedian Bill Burr surmised in his 2012 standup special "​​You People Are All the Same," Arnie should be "unloading trucks in Transylvania [...] but because he's a great man, he had the balls to move to America and became famous for lifting weights." Schwarzenegger did indeed go from driving tanks in the Austrian army to becoming arguably the greatest bodybuilder of all time, winning the Mr. Olympia title seven times. But he also became one of the biggest actors in Hollywood, and arguably the most popular action star in history, all while simultaneously carrying family-friendly comedy fare such as "Kindergarten Cop" and "Jingle All The Way" — one of the best Christmas movies of all time. Oh, and he also found time to marry into the Kennedy family and become the governor of California.

The Governator didn't get where he is without being highly competitive. Throughout his career he's done what it takes to get ahead, often displaying a penchant for trolling that has manifested in harmless pranks and light-hearted teasing of co-stars. But on other occasions, especially when it came to Schwarzenegger's rivalries, it resulted in him actually trying to sabotage others. And of all the trolling Arnie has engaged in a 50-year-plus career, arguably his most fiendishly impressive trick was the one he pulled on longtime rival Sylvester Stallone.

Schwarzenegger's History Of Trolling

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Hollywood legend and comes across as a perfectly charming gent in public. But at times throughout his career, he's also seemed worryingly adept at playing mind games — a trait he clearly developed way before his acting career took off.

Back in 1977, George Butler's "Pumping Iron" put the aspiring actor on Hollywood's radar, and if it wasn't a documentary, it would count as one of Schwarzenegger's best films. It follows bodybuilders as they prepare for the 1975 Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia competitions, and showcases Arnie's competitive drive in some surprisingly candid moments — including the one where he can't stop talking about orgasms. Throughout the docudrama, the then-28-year-old can be seen putting on a masterclass in manipulation and generally psyching out his competition, especially in the case of fellow competitor Lou Ferrigno, who would eventually be cast as the Incredible Hulk over Schwarzenegger.

At one point, the young Austrian bodybuilder goes on an extended monologue that feels genuinely sinister. He explains how, if Ferrigno shows up to the contest in shape, he'll take him out for the night, and "by the time the night is over, the next morning he will be ready to lose. I mean I will just talk him into that, it's no problem to do."

Arnie has since said that some of the film's events were true while "some of it was created and made up." Still, the role of oddly smug manipulator seemed to come a little too easy to the Austrian Oak. Throughout "Pumping Iron," he's clearly having a good time trying to get into the heads of his competitors. And as his career progressed, that side of him would often re-emerge.

Sly Vs Arnie

In a more amusing example than the tense mind games of "Pumping Iron," on the set of 1987's "Predator," Arnold Schwarzenegger claimed to have asked the wardrobe department to tell his co-star, Jesse Ventura, that his arms measured an inch bigger than Schwarzenegger's, even though the reverse was true. He then made a bet with Ventura for a bottle of champagne over whose arms were bigger, knowing he would agree, having been told by the wardrobe department that he had Schwarzenegger beat. The Austrian obviously won the bet when it was discovered that his arms actually measured three inches bigger than Ventura's.

But of all his rivalries, friendly or otherwise, Schwarzenegger's most significant was with his chief competitor for the biggest action hero of the 20th century: Sylvester Stallone. These days, the pair are friends, even appearing alongside each other in "Escape Plan" and "The Expendables" (though Arnie eventually walked away from the series). But there was a time when they genuinely hated each other. During the '80s and '90s, Stallone and Schwarzenegger were about as competitive as you can get, trying to consistently outdo the other in terms of box office earnings, physical appearance, how many people they killed on-screen, even down to the size of the movie weapons they used. "Commando," for example, was really just a chance for Schwarzenegger to out-Stallone Sly.

And despite their eventual reconciliation, the protracted competition between the two truly brought out the best of Schwarzenegger's trolling. Perhaps his finest moment was tricking Stallone into starring in a film he knew was a dud.

'This Was Really Bad'

In an infamous moment of machiavellian brilliance, Arnold Schwarzenegger managed to orchestrate Sylvester Stallone to star in a truly awful, career-damaging film. Roger Spottiswoode's comedy "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot" arrived in 1992 and had Sly playing a cop whose mother (Estelle Getty) insinuates herself into every aspect of his life, including his police work. It's widely regarded, by even Stallone, as one of the worst movies ever made. Roger Ebert described it as "so utterly lacking in even the smallest morsel of redeeming value, that you stare at the screen in stunned disbelief." But if there was any redeeming value, it was in the story of how this historic blunder came to be.

When the script was doing the rounds, it first came to Schwarzenegger, who immediately recognized its poor quality. Rather than simply move on, he decided to use it as an opportunity to get one over on Stallone. He explained in a Beyond Fest Q&A back in 2017:

"I've also done some movies that went right in the toilet, right? That were bad. But this was really bad. So I went in — this was during our war — I said to myself, 'I'm going to leak out that I have tremendous interest.' I know the way it works in Hollywood. I would then ask for a lot of money. So then they'd say, 'Let's go give it to Sly. Maybe we can get him for cheaper.' So they told Sly, 'Schwarzenegger's interested. Here's the press clippings. He's talked about that. If you want to grab that one away from him, that is available.' And he went for it! He totally went for it. A week later, I heard about it, 'Sly is signing now to do this movie.' And I said, [pumps fist] 'Yes!'"

Stallone Knew How Bad It Was

Sylvester Stallone has acknowledged how bad "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot" was, and that his longtime rival got one over him. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter last November, he said: "'Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot' was supposed to be like 'Throw Momma from the Train' with the mom as this really nasty piece of work. Instead, you hire the nicest woman in Hollywood, Estelle Getty, who you wish was your mother. That's the end of that! Also, I had heard [Arnold] Schwarzenegger was going to do that movie and I said, 'I'm going to beat him to it.' I think he set me up."

Not content with pulling one of the greatest misdirects in Hollywood history on his rival, Schwarzenegger responded to THR's request to confirm the story: "In those days we did all kinds of crazy things to get ahead in our rivalry. Luckily for us and everyone else, today, we root for each other. Thank God, because we sure don't ever need another 'Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.'"

Interestingly enough, Schwarzenegger would go on to work with Roger Spottiswoode in the 2000 sci-fi actioner "The 6th Day" in a bid to reinvent himself. It was a disappointment, though nothing like the irrefutably abject "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot," and certainly nothing that could mar Schwarzenegger's story of global domination. Not that Stallone let the film define his career -- he continues to appear in everything from Marvel to "Tulsa King."

But were it not for Arnie's competitiveness and unsettling manipulative abilities, none of it would have happened. As it stands though, the legacy of Spottiswoode's 1992 movie is that of a lasting tribute to Arnold's legendary trolling.

Read this next: The 18 Best Action Movie Actors Ranked

The post Arnold Schwarzenegger Tricked Sylvester Stallone Into The Flop Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot appeared first on /Film.

L.Kynes shares a report from CSO Online: At a time when almost all software contains open source code, at least one known open source vulnerability was detected in 84% of all commercial and proprietary code bases examined by researchers at application security company Synopsys. In addition, 48% of all code bases analyzed by Synopsys researchers contained high-risk vulnerabilities, which are those that have been actively exploited, already have documented proof-of-concept exploits, or are classified as remote code execution vulnerabilities. The vulnerability data -- along with information on open source license compliance -- was included in Synopsys' 2023 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report (PDF), put together by the company's Cybersecurity Research Center (CyRC). "Of the 1,703 codebases that Synopsys audited in 2022, 96% of them contained open source," adds L.Kynes, citing the report. "Aerospace, aviation, automotive, transportation, logistics; EdTech; and Internet of Things are three of the 17 industry sectors included in the report that had open source in 100% of their audited codebases. In the remaining verticals, over 92% of the codebases contained open source."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the things that really hit home for so many of us when "Clerks" first hit the scene in 1994 was that the lead characters were just as nerdy about movies as we were. It's so commonplace these days, but back then it was shocking that characters in a movie acknowledged that other movies existed.

One of the most memorable examples of this is when Dante and Randall have an in-depth debate about the collateral damage whenever Luke and the rebel alliance blew up the Death Star in "Star Wars." That rang true for so many of us. I mean, we didn't have a new, cool "Star Wars" movie or TV show to look forward to every year. In the early '90s, we kinda thought that "Return of the Jedi" was the last movie we were ever going to get, so our only options were to get obsessed with the Expanded Universe novels or compulsively rewatch the trilogy over and over again.

Kevin Smith clearly had the same late-night geeky conversations as my friends and I did and he put one of these topics into "Clerks." What about all the workers on the Death Star? That thing was big enough to be a small planet. No way were the workers all bad guy Stormtroopers, there certainly had to be laborers and contractors and plumbers and whatnot, so does that mean the Rebel alliance killed a ton of innocent people when they blew up? Probably!

Funnily enough, the most serious "Star Wars" story we've ever gotten took a cue from this joking question. 

A Silly Conversation Turns Into A Serious Storyline

Tony Gilroy's "Andor" sees the title character imprisoned and working day and night building these odd x-shaped pieces of ... something. Turns out the Empire was using prison labor to build all the individual pieces that would eventually make the Death Star. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Gilroy admitted that his very adult "Star Wars" show took inspiration from this admittedly silly line of questioning. There is merit to thinking about the details of this galaxy far, far away and Gilroy was intrigued enough to work it into "Andor." Here's what he said:

"In 'Clerks' they talk about who's cleaning up the Death Star, right? Like, who's building all these ships? The amount of material that the Empire has is just epic. Where does it come from? Where does all that stuff come from? So we're trying to say, Man, it's a massive effort to build all these ships and build all these weapons, and build all these buildings [...] All this stuff needs to be built and I don't think everybody was getting $15 an hour to do it."

One of the joys of "Andor" is how evil the Empire is in straight bureaucratic terms. It's not just big bad Darth Vader using his space magic to slaughter people, it's the institution itself that is set up to conquer the galaxy and enslave as many of them as they can get away with without prompting open revolt. There are innocent people helping build up this grand Empire, but they have no choice in the matter.

The fact that such a dramatic look at "Star Wars" took direct inspiration from such a silly conversation and made it into a deep, resonant storyline within "Andor" should put a smile on all of our "Star Wars" obsessed faces.

Read this next: Andor Character Guide: Meet The Cast Of The Rogue One Prequel Series

The post Tony Gilroy Used A Clerks Joke As Inspiration For Andor's Prison appeared first on /Film.

In what is the second killer bear movie in as many weeks -- "Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey" was the other -- Elizabeth Banks' "Cocaine Bear" is a wonderfully blunt, refreshingly straightforward grindhouse horror/comedy about, well, a bear on cocaine. Based on a real-life 1985 incident of a black bear eating a $15 million stash of abandoned cocaine, Banks' film extrapolates that the bear in question went on a crazed murder spree after consuming the drugs. Not only did the bear get high, but it immediately got addicted, fiendishly tearing through the Kentucky woods looking for more bricks of cocaine that had been thrown out of a drug dealer's plane. It even thought to give some cocaine to its cubs. In real life, the bear merely died.

Perhaps a mild spoiler, but at the end of the film, the bear survives. The drug dealers who went looking for their missing cocaine were either viciously mauled, or wisely washed their hands of the cocaine business. The bear was left slightly crazed by the incident, left to roam the forests seeking a fix. "Cocaine Bear" is structured like an old-fashioned, PSA-tinged scare film, but undercuts any kind of bloviating, righteous messages with its whimsical tone and silly premise. 

The film opened on February 24, 2023, and has already scored $2 million in preview screenings. It's projected to earn $15 to $17 million in its opening weekend, which is not a bad take. Naturally, the film's screenwriter, Jimmy Warden, is already thinking about extending his film into a franchise. In a recent interview with Variety, Warden revealed that he wanted to send his ursa major into the cosmos.

Cocaine Bear In Space

When asked about the mild sequel tease at the end -- the bear surviving -- Warden revealed that he has a whole series of "Cocaine Bear" films in mind. It is, after all, the ethos of modern filmmaking to ensure that any mild hit immediately take up permanent residence in the pop consciousness. One cannot gain any kind of cultural traction without immediately planning sequels. Warden doesn't just want a single sequel. He wants many. He wants so many that eventually the cocaine bear gets ridiculous. He wants, "Not just a sequel. Many sequels," saying that '"Cocaine Bear in Space' is where we would probably end." When asked if he was joshing a bit, Warden said:

"I'm f***ing with you about 'Cocaine Bear Goes to Space.' But for the sequels, I definitely have ideas for that. The bear's not the bad guy in this movie. What happened is a product of circumstance and everybody else's poor decisions. I think that is a story that we can continue to tell over and over again. I'd be excited to tell it because there are some really good ideas that we have for the subsequent movies."

Indeed, the cocaine bear is not the villain of its movie. It's the drug dealers, killers, muggers, and criminals who are the bad guys. The bear is merely an X factor, an unknown element that provides the bad guys with their moral comeuppance. It just happens to be addicted to cocaine. Anywhere that someone is making bad decisions and using coke, this bear could show up. 

The Brave Tradition Of Taking Horror Into Space

"Cocaine Bear Goes to Space" would follow in a proud tradition of horror franchises, when they seem to have run out of creative steam, send their killers into space. Whenever it happens, it's odd, and its oddness always catches the eye. 

In 1996, special effects technician Kevin Yagher directed "Hellraiser: Bloodline," the fourth film in its series. The film was set over three time periods, following a toymaker name Lemarchand (Bruce Ramsay) who lived in 1796 France, as well as his descendant on the modern day, and a further descendant in 2127. Each generation of Lemarchand encountered the hedonistic "Hellraiser" cenobites, unleashed from hell by a cursed puzzle box. The film climaxes on a space station, built to be an anti-box. Pinhead (Doug Bradley) kills people on board the space station. 

The following year, B-movie luminary Brian Trenchard-Smith took the already-campy "Leprechaun" series into space with, well, "Leprechaun 4: In Space." That film involves a wedding gone awry and a Leprechaun marriage to an alien princess, not to mention space marines and evil mutants. It's as dumb as it sounds. One would also do well to remember the 2001 film "Jason X," the tenth film in the "Friday the 13th" series. In that film, Jason Voorhees is cryogenically frozen for centuries, awakened on board a space ship, and physically enhanced by medical nanites. They even build him a new hockey mask. It's as dumb as it sounds. 

And who could forget Darrell Root's 2004 film "Dracula 3000?" The answer is: everyone. Robert Rodriguez's promised sequel "Machete Kills Again ... In Space" has not come to fruition. 

One can hope for a better conclusion for "Cocaine Bear in Space." Let's see that bear eff up some astronauts. 

Read this next: 14 Sequels That Truly Didn't Need To Happen

The post Cocaine Bear Screenwriter Already Has Sequels In Mind (Including Cocaine Bear Goes To Space) appeared first on /Film.

Trapped underground with no escape from strangers is a basic recipe for horror. Sadly enough, these were conditions many found themselves in during World War I. Soldiers huddled in trenches with nothing around them but the smell of death and near-perpetual darkness, horror sparks the imagination. We get a glimpse of this horror in the World War I horror-thriller, BUNKER.

Directed by Adrian Langley and written by Michael Huntsman, the film’s setting lends itself to potential horror success. However, the slow pacing and limited spacing in relation to the runtime make the natural isolation-driven tension dissipate. As a character piece, it succeeds as we watch each soldier have their moment.

Set towards the end of World War I, BUNKER throws Americans, the British, and a German prisoner of war together in a bunker. The Americans and British take an opportunity to seize German ground in the trenches, but it is revealed it is a trap. Left with minimal options, they flee into the bunker only to find a different sort of hell. Something or someone is set on stirring trouble in the men, and it will do everything in its power to ensure death reigns.

A character-driven tale

As mentioned previously, BUNKER itself functions better as a character-driven piece than outright horror. There is great usage of shadows and questionable milky substances to bring on the ick factor. There are clear set-ups to drive tension, but the slow-beating nature of the pace keeps it from truly terrifying.

That said, no one can deny that the writing, direction, and performances enable us to intimately understand the characters in BUNKER. Making his surprising feature debut is Patrick Moltane as the commanding, scene-stealing Lt. Turner. The experience theatrical actor chews the scenery and sets the bar for his castmates around him. His performance increasingly becomes unhinged until fully embraces the madness that consumes him. Well done. May more film roles come Moltane’s way.

Luke Baines is a quiet calm presence. His appearance and accent work already render him suspicious here. It is in the intimate moments with Eddie Ramos’ Segura that let us peek behind the steely visage he maintains. Segura is the clear moral compass of BUNKER, even despite the nationalist and racial digs made at his expense by Lt. Turner. This role gives Eddie Ramos space to showcase his range and, for the most part, he succeeds. Both Baines and Ramos provide balance with the more emotionally unbalanced characters.

BUNKER and its potential

The art department, production design team, and set decoration work in BUNKER are superb. Knowing that things were shot in sequence and the tight schedule the team was on, the hard work is noticed here. Jos Hurt’s costume design work also shines, especially in maintaining the difference in detail with the uniforms. The one issue I have is with the creature not quite fitting into the overall vibe of the BUNKER. The work on the costume and FX makeup is great. There’s nothing wrong with that. More of a personal preference than not, but a creature that felt lived in and also assimilated into the surroundings might have worked better. As is, once revealed, it stood out but didn’t quite feel natural to the environment established.

Overall, there is a lot of potential in BUNKER. Its slow pacing works specifically in allowing us moments with each character. The downside of the slow pacing is that the build of tension and dread takes too long, ultimately undercutting the predictable reveal near the end of the film. If you focus on it being more like a psychological character-focused work, it may be better received. Coupled with the performances from its cast, that is where BUNKER excels.

WWI horror thriller BUNKER is now available in 150+ theaters in over 50 markets via Blue Fox Entertainment.

The post [Movie Review] BUNKER appeared first on Nightmarish Conjurings.

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